Popes, Atheists and Freedom

Secularists should recognize that the pope's fight is their fight.

From The Wall Street Journal

By Daniel Henninger

This being the season of hope, Islamic extremists of course have been engaged in their annual tradition of blowing up Christian churches. 

An attack by a radical Muslim sect on two churches in northern Nigeria killed six people on Christmas Eve. On the Philippines' Jolo Island, home to al Qaeda-linked terrorists, a chapel bombing during Christmas Mass injured 11. 

One of the central public events during these days at year's end is the Pope's midnight Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. In his homily the pope invariably pleads for peace, but on Friday evening a viewer could not have missed the meaning when Benedict XVI twice mentioned "garments rolled in blood," from Isaiah 9:5.

The image, as befits Isaiah, is poetic and disturbing. Benedict surely intended it so: "It is true," he said, "that the 'rod of his oppressor' is not yet broken, the boots of warriors continue to tramp and the 'garment rolled in blood' still remains." He was of course referring to the sustained violence against Christian minorities by Islamic fundamentalists.

Hours before this, from a window above St. Peter's Square, Benedict also took a pass on the holiday pabulum handed out by other world leaders this time of year by explicitly criticizing China. He said the "faithful of the church in mainland China [should not] lose heart through the limitations imposed on their freedom of religion and conscience."

The anti-Communist Karol Wojtyla with predecessor John Paul I in 1978.

For some, the Vatican's efforts on behalf of Christian minorities in Islamic countries or among China's population of 1.3 billion is regarded as worthy and admirable, but only a footnote against the grand sweep of current geopolitical concerns. Iran's bomb, China's economic importance and all that. This is a mistake. In these times, the pope's agenda is the civilized world's agenda. The pope's agenda is individual freedom.

To the extent that the goal of freedom still occupies a high place in the purposes of foreign policy, then the pope remains an important strategic ally, as he has been since Karol Wojtyla left Poland to become pope in October 1978. 

The reality of the modern Church's interests aligned with the world's best interests emerges forcefully in the recently published second volume of George Weigel's magisterial biography of John Paul II, "The End and the Beginning." For this final volume, Mr. Weigel had access to material from the archives of former Communist intelligence services. The book's first half tells the tale of Communist security agencies—the Soviet KGB, East Germany's Stasi and Poland's SB—coming to grips with the threat posed to their system by Karol Wojtyla, first as archbishop of Cracow and then as Pope John Paul II. One Polish Communist Party ideologist called then-Cardinal Wojtyla "the only real ideological threat in Poland."

In 1984, after John Paul had completed two pastoral pilgrimages to Communist Poland, a conference was convened by members of the KGB, Warsaw Pact and Cuban intelligence services. Its purpose: to discuss "joint measures for combating the subversive activities of the Vatican."

The pope's "subversive activities" are relevant to our disagreements today over whether the West should engage or confront Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. Then as now, the issue was not one or the other. Instead, it was about understanding the nature of the opposition and forming policy to fit that reality.

"On being elected pope," Mr. Weigel writes, "John Paul II did not believe that the day was close at hand when communism would lose. But he did understand the nature of the confrontation." That meant deploying his best weapon: a direct, public moral challenge.

Before John Paul, the Vatican's dominant diplomatic strategy was Ostpolitik, which tipped toward constant engagement with the status quo. Karol Wojtyla, like many dissidents who emerged in these years, had lived with the daily reality of the communist system. John Paul pushed Vatican policy toward a public, unapologetic claim for individual freedom. On his final trip to Poland, John Paul openly asserted his support for Lech Walesa's "Solidarnosc" reformers. 

Days after Benedict XVI chastised China before thousands in St. Peter's Square last week, a Chinese newspaper run by the People's Daily replied to his defense of Christians there: "The Vatican has to face the fact that all religious beliefs are free in China, as long as they do not run counter to the country's laws."

"Face the facts" sums up nicely the worldview and foreign policies of China, Iran and Russia. Get over it. John Paul said no. Benedict again says no. 

It has been odd in recent years to see prominent atheists make so much effort to diminish Judeo-Christian belief. In the modern world, and certainly in the U.S. from the Pilgrims onward to the Bill of Rights, religious practice has been bound up in the idea—now the principle—of individual freedom. I don't think secularist arguments alone for individual freedoms have sufficient strength and fiber to stand against their current opposition. Benedict's fight for freedom and that of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo are the same. Wojtyla and Walesa proved that once already.